THE VICTORY OF THE COMMONS 327
postpone his journey till the afternoon. . . . If I have satisfactory news 1911
this evening I shall come up for Cabinet 12.30. My voice is on the mend Age 58
but still croaky."
He, too, in spite of his robust health and even temperament, had
felt the strain of these days, and it had been aggravated, far more
than the public knew, by the long-drawn out and very anxious crisis
in foreign affairs which accompanied the domestic struggle. He had
of course been heavily bombarded in the Lords' debates, and in his
final speech Lord Halsbury had—with an aptness of which he was
unaware—dwelt grimly on the fact that the Lord Oxford who had
advised Queen Anne to create twelve new peers to overcome the
opposition of the House of Lords to the Treaty of Utrecht had after-
wards been impeached and committed to the Tower, where he
was thankful to escape with the relatively mild penalty of two
years' close confinement. But no sooner was the issue decided
than the stream of wrath was diverted from the head of the Prime
Minister on to the heads of the even guiltier Unionist peers and
Bishops who had saved the Bill by voting with the Government.
The language used about these by certain Unionist newspapers
would be worthy of a place in any anthology of invective. The
Okbe expressed the hope that " no honest man will take any of
them by the hand again, that their friends will disown them, their
clubs expel them, and that alike in politics and social life they
will be made to feel the bitter shame they have brought upon us
all." The Observer said that " there could be no closing of the
ranks while there are traitors in the ranks, unexpelled and un-
rebuked/' and declared the party to have been "disgraced by
the ignoble train of Unionists, lay and clerical who voted with
the Government." Asquith himself has quoted with great appre-
ciation a passage in which Lord Kobert Cecil threatened the Bishops
with expulsion when the time came to reform the House of Lords.
But these are now curiosities of controversy which are only worth
reviving in so far as they illustrate the temper of these times.
What exactly would have happened if the Bill had been rejected ?
Constitutional and historical students have been heard to regret
that the experiment was not actually made, and, though the
question is academic, it is from that point of view worth a little
consideration. There is no doubt about the Government's in-
tention. They meant, in Lord Morley's words, to advise " a large
and prompt creation of peers "—" sufficient in number to guard
against any possible combination of the different parties in opposition
by which the Parliament Bill might be exposed a second time to